NOW—Sat 5/12 @HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

Regular screenings $9; In-person screenings $12; Lectures free (but tickets required)

Although not completely comprehensive—1985’s sublime Ozu homage Tokyo-Ga in particular will be missed—the HFA’s Wim Wenders retrospective, put together to complement the filmmaker’s pair of Norton Lectures (scheduled for delivery on April 2nd and 9th at the Sanders Theatre), is a plenty extensive one, offering up not only a rich, career-spanning selection of works—about evenly split between features and documentaries, interspersed with shorts—from one of Germany’s most key (and keening) post-’68 filmographies, but also a totally FREE screening, on May 12th, of the five-hour cut of Until the End of the World (1991), the time- and space-defying (and, it seemed to many at the time, sense-defying) sci-fi wundersprawl with which Wenders crashed his brief commercial crest. Said crest, eternally recurring at peak-swell, is represented here by Paris, Texas (1985) and Wings of Desire (1987), each accompanied by a discussion with the filmmaker. At the heart of the entire operation is the rightly-revered Road Trilogy—Alice in the Cities (1974), Wrong Move (1975), and Kings of the Road (1976)—three ramblingly discursive, mostly monochromatic exercises in after-the-goldrush kraut-blues that together comprise a set of haunted variations on Wenders’ abiding theme of uncertain selves at shifting intersections of history and culture.